


remember me to one who lives there (she once was a true love of mine)

by seabiscuit



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Old phones, bad choices become good choices, eve runs away from her feelings, pine city usa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:28:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22137061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seabiscuit/pseuds/seabiscuit
Summary: A gunshot, a stab wound, a broken heart, a hotel in the distant north.(immediate post-season 2. Things part and they come together)
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 25
Kudos: 292





	remember me to one who lives there (she once was a true love of mine)

_ Paris, France _

The woman comes five minutes after Adriene flips the “closed” sign to “open”. She’s at the round parlor table, in front of the tarot card deck, applying lipstick in a hand mirror. The sound startles her so much that her arm jerks and a deep maroon line slashes up above her cupid’s bow. 

“Hello?”

At first, she’s a shroud. She’s wearing a fur coat that reaches her ankles, baubles on her wrists and neck, and large sunglasses. “Good morning.” The woman says in a thick Russian accent. She doesn’t remove her sunglasses. “I’m here to…” she gestures a bit with one hand, to the baubles of Adriene’s store: the crystal ball, the velvet drapes. The sign that says  _ Adriene LePlante Psychic Tarot Readings Spells.  _ Her gesture says, you know what I’m here for. 

“Of course, of course--” Adriene begins to stand from the table, but the woman waves her down.

“Sit down.” She says sternly, and crosses the room. The woman sits opposite her at the parlor table, and up close Adriene can make out more of her features. Her hair is straw blonde and her face is round and pretty, but set in a frown. She takes off her sunglasses by the stem and sets them on the table without folding them closed. “I am here because I have had my heart broken.” She says with a kind of dramatic flourish.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, yes, I know. Poor me.” She huffs and sits back into the chair, crossing her arms. Adriene thinks she looks like a petulant child. The woman sucks her teeth. “Can I ask you a question--”

“Adriene.”

“Can I ask you a question, Adriene?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever been in love?”  
Caught off guard, Adriene blinks. For a wild second she wonders, _have I?_ It’s the intensity of the person sitting across from her, whose expression has shifted from consternation to curiosity. She’s waiting patiently for Adriene’s reply. “Yes.” She responds. 

“And what did it feel like?”

“Oh, I don’t--” but Adriene can tell that the woman is not going to take ‘no’ for an answer, so she presses on. “It’s crazy-making. You feel like you want to be around them all the time. You feel like you want to see no harm come to them. You feel a million different things. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” The woman says almost breathlessly. She’s sitting forward now, elbows on the table, chin cupped in her palms. “Oh, this is very inconvenient. Isn’t it very inconvenient? You know, I used to think I couldn’t fall in love.” It’s impossible to tell whether the woman is talking to Adriene or herself. She has an energy that bounces and refracts off of every surface of the room until the room is full of her. Adriene, uncomfortable, pulls a little at the fabric of her shirt. “But then--” Another gesture. Adriene knows again that she’s supposed to understand what the woman means, and she does. 

“I can do a tarot card reading for you, or a palm reading. Maybe there’s something else in your future.”

The woman clicks her tongue and shakes her head. “No, that won’t do. What else do you have for me?”

“I can curse him.”

Another head shake, more furious this time. “No, no, it’s all wrong. I already shot her. And you know what the fucked up thing is?” Adriene opens her mouth and closes it, purses her lips. “I didn’t even like it, Adriene. I felt bad after! Can you believe it?” 

“I don’t--” The woman’s eyes are scanning the room. She’s leaning back again, all easy curiosity, seemingly oblivious to Adriene’s discomfort. Her shoulders are thrown back and her head is slightly lolled. Adriene is sputtering like a fool when the woman sits up straighter, eye caught on something.

“What about a love spell?” She’s pointing to a sign beneath a shelf of corked bottles that says  _ love potions.  _ “Can you do one of those?”

“Of course.” Adriene stands and feels instant relief to not be trapped on the same plane as the woman anymore. She moves to the shelf behind her, full of old leather bound books, and selects one. A lot of freaks come in and out of the store, she tells herself. Weirdos love love potions. She turns. “You didn’t really shoot her, did you?”

The woman laughs gaudily and it does nothing to put Adriene at ease. It has all the panache of a theatrical performance. “Of course not, silly. I was joking.”

“Alright.” Adriene settles back down across the table, opening the book up in front of her. She places her finger underneath one of the lines, ready. “The first thing I need is her name.”

The woman smiles.

_ Denali National Park, Alaska _

“Graduate school at Cambridge, former security officer at--” The man brings Eve’s resume closer to his face and squints. “ _ MI6?”  _ His eyes raise over the paper, which he sets back onto the folding table in between them. “Ma’am, this is a job opening for a hotel desk clerk.”

“I know.” Eve says helpfully. She smiles. “I’m looking for a career change. Temporary career change.”

“I think I need to call my manager.” He stands, green polo tucked into his slacks. It makes Eve feel self conscious about the interview outfit she’d worn, more fit for an office in London than an Alaskan lodge. He’s trim but muscular, curly haired, not a day over 24. Eve thinks his name tag says Ben. There’s a wall phone a few feet away that he picks up and uses to speak a few words to a voice on the other end of the phone, then hang up and turn back toward her. He shrugs. “She wants to give you a tour.” 

The hotel manager is a woman in her early 60’s, wearing the same green polo as Ben. Her name is May Anne and she makes a lot of references to  _ The Shining  _ in a way that Eve does not find comforting at all. If May Anne thinks anything of the way walks behind her with a slight limp, she says nothing about it. 

“There’s 5 floors, 160 rooms. Plus the guest cabins, we’ve got…” She pauses to do the math in her head. “Five of those, plus the spa, work out area, computer room. You won’t get any reception out here, so you’ll need to use the computer room.” 

“That’s perfect.” Eve smiles tightly. They’re moving slowly down a wood panelled hallway, past rows of numbered doors. 

“The job is pretty easy. You’ll be the day desk clerk, mostly just check people in and help them arrange transportation around the park. You familiar with Denali?”

“Not really.”

“That’s fine.” They’re approaching the end of the hallway, to a large double door with a sign that says  _ Dining Room.  _ “I’ll give you some guide books to read up on.” She pushes open the doors and they step into the dining room. Eve’s breath leaves her body in a flustered rush.

Beyond the tables there’s a panorama window offering a breathtaking view of the park below them. The lodge is pressed like a thumbprint into the mountainside, giving the impression that they could slide off at any moment. These days, when Eve has a thought like that, it’s followed by  _ I hope we do.  _ Not a wish, but a challenge. She reaches down and rubs her sore thigh. 

“This is the real gem of the place.” May Anne says with a note of pride in her voice. The way she says it, Eve can tell she’s been working there for some time. She finds that she likes May Anne. “I could stand here for hours.”

Eve is shown to what will be her rooms--all staff are offered quarters in the hotel due to the isolation--which is a simple set up with a double bed, a couch, and a TV. HBO included. May Anne tells her that she gets room and board, plus $500 a week, which she’s assured is a lot in Alaska. When Eve tells her that she can start immediately, as she has all of her possessions in her car outside, the older woman is again unphased. Eve realizes that this is probably not the first or the last time this has happened in this lodge. She realizes that she’s in the right place.

Later when she’s finally alone in the room, Eve begins the now laborious task of undressing. Her shirt comes off easy, but taking off her pants is a 10 minute ordeal. She sits on the bed, groaning as her knee bends, and rolls her jeans off, revealing a layer of long underwear. Those come off as well and reveal the explosion of scar tissue on her left thigh. A poor concealment for the shattered bone underneath. She passes her open palm over it, feeling the texture. Her physical therapist had told her to be thankful to her body for healing her. She tries to be grateful. 

Eve flops her body down on the bed, feeling the bounce. It’s not a bad mattress, she surmises. Her good leg swivels onto the bed and she uses her hand to lift her other onto it as well, until she’s laying with her feet dangling off and her arms spread wide. Suddenly, she feels her ears get hot and redden. She touches her fingertips to one. 

Her mother used to tell her it meant somebody was thinking of her. Eve swallows.

***

The days start passing easy. Easi _ er.  _ Even though it’s winter. Even though she’s in Alaska. Eve is up before the sun rises, well before. She’s at the front desk in her polo marking the same places on a map for bundled tourists--the skiing trails, the lodge where they can rent snowshoes. She’s in the kitchen eating a bowl of venison stew standing up, staring off into space. She’s outside taking the trash out, wearing more clothes than she ever thought possible. She’s in the break room, watching Ben and Danny and Hunter roll a blunt on the billiards table over the top of a lovewarn copy of  _ The Shining.  _

Eve feels as though she’s trying to retrain her body.  _ You can be normal,  _ she tells herself, slipping into a hot bath with a wince. Her head lolls against the back of the tub.  _ You can forget and be normal.  _ She slips down, down, down, until her last exhale makes bubbles in the surface of the bathwater. She holds her breath for as long as she can stand it, and then surfaces again with a gasp. 

In some ways, moving to one of the most remote parts of the country into a hotel with no cell phone service is nothing but a gesture. Eve could have taken off to the moon and Villanelle would have been right on her tail in a haute couture space suit. But she needed to be able to say that she’d tried.

That’s what she thinks when her hotel phone rings for the first time.  _ I tried.  _ She’s sitting on the couch in her room, watching some drek on HBO, swigging from a Montucky Cold Snack. The shrill ring of the phone over her shoulder has all the effect of a serial killer in a horror movie sneaking up, axe raised, finally ready to catch their prey. Eve, trance-like, sets her beer on the end table, moves to her bed, sits on the edge, and picks up the receiver with a soft click. She presses it to the side of her face. 

“It is really rude to go on our vacation without me.” The voice on the other end says. Just hearing her, Eve feels her body begin to itch. 

“I thought the plan was off,” She responds. “because you shot me.”

Villanelle tsks. “I am not going to apologize. But I will not do it again.”

Isn’t that a kind of apology? Eve wonders. “It’s okay. I guess we’re even, huh?”

“Yes, but you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.” Eve flops down onto the bed, school girl-like. “We could be there together right now. In a cabin. Much better than a hotel with only 4.4 stars on Trip Advisor.” 

“Hey, it’s pretty nice. They have a spa.”

Villanelle scoffs and Eve finds herself smiling. “Eve, you need for somebody to teach you about the finer things in life.”

“And I bet you think that person should be you.”

“Who better?” Eve tries to discern where she is through the sounds on the other end of the phone, but there’s nothing to give away Villanelle’s position. She’s probably in an apartment somewhere. Maybe Paris? Vienna? Definitely in a robe. A robe that costs more than Eve is making in a month. The finer things. “I am glad to hear that you are safe. How is your leg?”

“Hurts.”

_ I am not going to apologise.  _ But there’s a long pause on the other end of the line, then. And then Villanelle says “You hurt me too, Eve.” And Eve knows that she has been playing this game knowing the rules the whole time. And she knows that she does hear hurt in Villanelle’s voice, real hurt, and that it’s all so fucked up but what about this hasn’t been? 

“So we’re even.” 

“Okay, even.”  
Eve wonders distantly what happens now. Now that the scales have been balanced, the books cooked, now that they’re _even._ What else is left but for them to go their separate ways? A gunshot, a stab wound, a broken heart, a hotel in the distant north. She wonders, _do I care anymore?_ “So...what are you up to?” But of course she does. She’s twirling the cord of the phone around her finger, kicking her good leg. Villanelle hums on the other end of the line.

“I am painting my nails and watching some horrible reality television. Did you know,” she says breathlessly. “That there is a whole show about virgins getting married? Eve, does this really happen?”

***

“Morning, boss.” That’s what all the young boys at the lodge call her, even though she is not their boss. Ben passes Eve a cup of coffee in a mug made to look like a tree trunk. She looks up from what she’s reading--some outdoorsman’s magazine--and nods in thanks. It’s been slow at her perch at the desk and she’d been waiting for a pick me up. “You look tired. Long night?”

“Mmm.” She sniffs the coffee and winces, half in pleasure. They know how to make it up here--strong enough to ward off the seasonal affective disorder. “I was talking to a friend.”

Ben grunts. All of their rooms are clustered together in the service wing, so she figures he must have heard her. Eve can hear them. It’s not something they ever talk about, except occasionally Ben or Hunter will invite her into their room to smoke a joint and watch  _ Keeping Up With the Kardashians.  _ She usually declines. “Ex-husband?”

“Ex-girlfriend.” Eve says without thinking. Ben’s eyebrows raise above his hairline but he says nothing, just takes a long drag from his own novelty mug and taps twice on the wood of the desk with his knuckles. “Alright. I’ll leave you to it then.”

Eve should never have picked up the phone. The day, the thing that had once seemed immeasurably easier, is now bogged down with thoughts of Villanelle. Their conversation the previous night had lasted hours and was not about playing a cat and mouse game of  _ gotcha.  _ Villanelle talked her through an episode of  _ Married at First Sight,  _ and they talked about Alaska, and they talked about Konstantin’s dick (they’d both seen it on accident, both agreed it suited him). 

But this is not part of Eve’s life anymore. Eve is starting her life over and her life starts after Villanelle, after murdering a man with an axe. She is not a psychopath, and she will not spend another moment thinking about it. 

But she’s just talked to Villanelle, and she does think about it. And she thinks with hot, giddy excitement, about whether she will call again tonight. 

***

“Have you seen the northern lights yet?” Villanelle asks, when she does call again that night. Eve responds that she hasn’t. She’s been out looking most nights, even when the weather is unbearable, which it usually is. They are, of course, famously unpredictable. They come and go as they please. “What a shame. You would have seen them if you were there with me.”

The way she says it--with such confidence in something so unknowable--makes a bubble of mirth rise in Eve. She half believes it. “I think you’d hate it up here. It’s so--so--”

“So what, Eve?”

“Common.” Is the word Eve lands on. Villanelle laughs on the other line. Behind her, the sound of the television. It’s in a foreign language that Eve cannot quite discern. “There’s a lot of camo print. They wear it on their pants  _ and _ their shirts.”

“Disgusting, my God.” There’s a brief pause, then. “I thought it would be a quiet place where we could get to know one another. You know, you, me, in a cabin--lots of candles.” 

Eve thinks about it. She thinks about a cabin with one room, the wind whistling outside. Villanelle, her face pressed close to Eve’s, whispering something there into her skin. Before this, she’d never allowed herself to think of the other woman doing anything so tender. But now is a different animal entirely. Now, she can hear the tremor of loss in Vilanelle’s voice there with the defiance. 

“But, whatever.” Villanelle barrels on. “Maybe I will go up there myself, like you.”

Eve thinks about it. Villanelle in some tacky vacation rental in the woods, snowed in and miserable. She wonders where she got the idea for Alaska in the first place, and wonders if she thought of it just to please Eve. “There’s plenty of room.” She responds, and Villanelle laughs. 

***

Her phone, her actual cell phone, rings three days later. Eve has it put away in the drawer of her nightstand, next to the hotel bible, because it’s all-in-all worthless to her. She opens the drawer with a rattle and holds it in the palm of her hand. The top right corner tells her that there is no service. The caller ID tells her that Carolyn Martens is trying to get in touch with her.

She hesitates for a beat, holding the phone in one hand with her other cupped under it, and then hits “accept” and presses it to her cheek.

“Hello, Eve.” 

Eve wonders if there’s any point in pointing out that it should be impossible for Carolyn to be calling her on this line. Probably not. “Hi, Carolyn.”

“Eve, I hate to interrupt you on your...vacation.” The way Carolyn is talking, Even though there’s no background noise, Eve knows she’s walking somewhere with purpose. It gives her that familiar feeling of trailing along behind her, at the whim of the next thing she says. “But I’m afraid we have a bit of a situation.”

“What kind of situation?”

“The kind that demands your special kind of expertise.” 

“You fired me.” Eve reminds her, knowing that it didn’t mean anything. Knowing that more than anything she quit. 

“Oh, whatever happened to bygones?” Carolyn tsks. “I hate to be boorish but I really must, you know, insist on it. I booked you on the next flight out of Fairbanks. Well, the next next flight. You really have yourself tucked away up there, don’t you?”

“I really do.” Eve agrees. She looks around the room, suddenly overtaken with a headache. She pinches her temples. 

“We’ve all done it.” Carolyn says. “And you can go back when we’re done, if you feel like it.” 

In the end, Eve prints out the boarding passes in the computer lounge. She arranges an extended medical leave, saying she needs to get physical therapy for her leg in Fairbanks, and leaves it at that. A sous chef is going to Fairbanks to pick up fish for that weeks’ suppers and so she tags along with him. They first leave the park, then get into a beaten up Ford and drive the rest of the way. The road is so dark that Eve thinks they could be heading straight into oblivion. The sous chef gobbles up Newports and flicks the butts out the window, one by one, saying nothing.

_ London, England  _

London is so loud that Eve gets a flash of vertigo when she disembarks the plane at Heathrow. A passing stranger asks if she’s okay and she realizes that she must have looked shell-shocked. She smiles tightly and waves them off, rubs her hand down her thigh, and staggers into the throng. 

Everything is just as she remembered it, touchstones from her old life that she notes just to tether herself a little bit to reality. She stops at an old shop and gets a meat pie and chips just to kill time, eats them with relish at a booth with gravy smeared on her chin, then realizes that there’s nothing else to do but meet with Carolyn Martens. She walks the rest of the way to her old building, ignoring the way her leg aches like a bad tooth. 

Nobody acknowledges her when she walks into the room. Hugo, notably, keeps his gaze averted to the floor. Most of the attendees are new to her, but by the looks on their faces she’s not new to them. They sit in folding chairs around the projector screen, helmed by Carolyn, and there’s one empty chair that Eve realizes is for her. She hasn’t stopped at her hotel yet and still has her rolling bag with her. 

“Eve.” Carolyn says, breaking the pin-drop silence in the room. “Please, sit down.”

She does, the wheels on her bag scraping behind her as she moves to her seat. 

It’s another female assassin. Of course it is. Eve wonders distantly when she became considered an expert in this, and then wonders if it’s because she’d accidentally seduced one of them and became in a hair’s breadth of running away with her to Alaska. Instead, she’d run away on her own, and being back face to face with the rubble of her life makes her want to vomit up the meat pie she’d just eaten nearly whole. The vertigo comes to her again, fresh and horrible. She puts her head between her knees but nobody says anything. 

Later, after the presentation, Carolyn pulls her aside into a conference room. “You can leave that outside the door.” She says, about Eve’s wheelie luggage. 

“You’re only here in a consultant role.” She cuts to the chase. “We need all the help we can get.” Carolyn slides a file across the table to Eve, thick with secrets. “I want you to look this over in your hotel room tonight. You are not by any means to go out into the field.” 

_ You don’t have to worry about that.  _ Eve thinks. Her leg, which is now always present in the back of her mind, throbs. “Okay.” She says, and accepts the folder. 

“I’m not going to ask you how you’re feeling, because I’m assuming it’s not well.” Carolyn leans back in her chair. “But I want you to know there’s no hard feelings about Rome. And I appreciate your time.”

“It’s not like I really had a choice.”

She  _ hmms  _ thoughtfully. “I think you would have come either way. People like you and me don’t just become desk clerks at 4-star hotels in Alaska.”

Eve thinks, against her better nature, that Carolyn is right. 

***

The hotel room that Carolyn booked for her makes the resort look like tacky garbage. Eve almost laughs when she gets to the room, covered in a fine layer of smog and sweat. She throws Carolyn’s file onto the bed, deciding it can wait until after she has a bath. 

The bathroom is palatial, and too much. Eve can see a distorted reflection of herself in the floor tiles, clean as they are, and watches the funhouse mirror version of her body change as she disrobes. Filling the tub makes the room foggy and sweet-smelling. There’s a board over the edge for reading, which she places her cell phone on, and then submerges herself into the boiling hot water.

Her cell phone rings and Eve, without checking the caller ID, knows who it is. She keeps her eyes closed and her head against a towel on the edge of the tub for one second before picking up the phone. She doesn’t say a word.

“You look very relaxed.” Eve wonders how Villanelle can see her. Is it through the porthole window above the bath? Unlikely for a 4th floor hotel room. It must be a camera, then. The old Eve would have risen from the tub immediately, water sloshing over the edges, and paced the cold white confines of the room until she found the bug. The new Eve, the funhouse mirror Eve, tips her head back and blinks at the ceiling. She wonders if she looks good. “Enjoying London?”  
“Not really.” Eve sniffs. “Are you here?” 

“Not really.” Villanelle mocks, a higher sing-song version of her voice. But there’s no malice behind it and Eve smiles a little. There’s a longer than usual silence and Eve realizes how accustomed she’s become to their chattiness. “Why haven’t you asked me to visit you?”

Eve sits up a little. She glances around, feeling suddenly desperate to make eye contact with Villanelle, or her proxy. “Well, you shot me.” She says. “For starters.”

“Oh Eve, I thought we had left that in the past.” It’s meant to be a joke, Eve knows, a tease. But lately when Villanelle jokes the layer of ice between her words and her feelings is becoming thinner. There’s a tremor of something just underneath the surface. “Have we not been talking?”

“We have.” Eve lifts a leg above the water, traces a finger down the slick surface. She’d just shaved in the last three days and she hates the jerk of relief she feels when she thinks that Villanelle can see her. She listens close, trying to hear any indication that she likes what she sees--a hitch of breath, a murmur. There’s nothing, and it frustrates her. “I kind of just thought you’d...show up.”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“Okay.”

“I  _ don’t. _ ” Villanelle whines, still unconvincing. Eve can practically hear her stomping her foot. “You are so stubborn and you think you know everything.” 

“I know you’re watching me right now.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to be perfect, can you?” For a brief, insane moment, Eve thinks about sitting up until her breasts are visible above the surface of the water. Then, she thinks, then I’ll hear it. Her breath catching. Eve is surprised about how desperate she is to reel Villanelle back in, how open she feels. She wants to be consumed again by Villanelle’s hunger. To be seen by Villanelle and no-one else. “An old dog cannot learn new tricks.”

  
“Oh.” Eve is so wrapped up in her fantasy--her breasts, Villanelle’s hot gaze--that she doesn’t realize how fall she’s strayed from the conversation. “Why not?”

“Because--” There’s a mild, wet sound that Eve recognizes as Villanelle licking her lips. “It is so hard for me to feel pleasure, except when I feel like I am pleasing you. Or when I feel your attention on me. I keep waiting to feel the thing that makes me want to kill you, but it never comes. I do hate you sometimes. But I like knowing that you are in the world, thinking about me. I can feel you thinking about me. I feel it in my cunt, sometimes.” 

Eve realizes that she is panting, that her mouth is dry. She sits up so quickly that water sloshes over the edges of the tub, revealing her breasts, the road down to her stomach. Villanelle’s breath catches. “Touch yourself.” She urges, and Eve does without a second thought, using her free hand to slide down her breast and play with her nipple. Her head falls back and she sighs, low and breathy. She palms her breast rougher, like how she imagines Villanelle would do it. “I’m going to make you come, and you’re going to thank me after.”

“Oh  _ God--”  _ Eve’s hand slips down, down, below the water and across the plane of her stomach. She itches to fumble with her clit, manipulate it exactly how Villanelle wants her to until she comes trembling and boneless. Her hand is at the apex of her legs when she hears Villanelle say  _ oh  _ and the sound of a door shutting, and the line clicking dead. For a moment she’s still in the tub, phone against her ear, right hand clutched in her pubic hair. She waits for some sign that the other woman is still on the line but there is none. Only dead air.

With a shaky hand, Eve sets the phone back on the shelf. The water around her is cooling and the steam in the bathroom has settled so that the air pricks at her exposed skin. She considers calling the number back but thinks better of it. She considers staying in the bath but it now feels lonely.

In the bedroom, in her robe and toweling her hair, Eve’s eyes drift to the thick folder she’d thrown on the bed. She licks her lips, something in her body still strung tight and vibrating. She picks it up and tosses it on the hotel desk next to her laptop, sits in the uncomfortable chair without bothering to put clothes on, and begins her work. 

***

Daylight is peeking through the curtains of Eve’s hotel room by the time she realizes how long she’s been working. Her desk is cluttered with notes written on hotel stationary, the file open and picked apart. She’s still in her robe, her body feeling soft and clean in the way that it does when you’ve air dried. Next to the bedside, her phone chimes, and Eve realizes that it’s her alarm going off. She blinks, pulling her head up, and tries to take stock of what’s happened. 

The wire inside her is still vibrating while she pulls on her clothes, pins up her hair, and places her notes as neatly as she can within the file. She makes a pot of coffee at the kitchenette and realizes last minute that she doesn’t need it, then makes a cup of tea to satisfy her craving for something warm. The bed is made exactly as Eve had found it when she arrived the previous evening, the desk is still a mess, the carpet still damp from her hurried footprints. It’s 7 AM and she has an hour to get to central London. 

“Eve,” Carolyn greets her when she arrives to the nearly-empty restaurant. “You look well rested.”

Eve furrows her brow and smiles, placing the folder in front of her on the table before she sits down. “It’s two women.”

“Hmm?” Carolyn is looking at her from over a cup of tea. Eve doesn’t bother to drop her handbag off her shoulder as she sits. 

“It’s two women. She has an accomplice.” Eve flips the file open to the appropriate page, the pictures annotated with her writing and research. Carolyn sets her teacup down in the saucer and turns the papers to face her, scanning them thoughtfully. She nods.

“It’s an interesting theory.”

“I don’t think it’s a theory.” Eve insists, surprised by her own ferocity. The look on Carolyn’s face says that she is too. “I think it’s clear if you read the whole file.”

“Alright. Breakfast?”

“I don’t--why am I here, Carolyn?”

  
“Do you not like the restaurant?”

“You could have sent me this file. Mailed it, or--” Eve shrugs her shoulders. “Why bring me to London?”

The waiter comes by and Carolyn flags him down, ordering something only for Eve and not herself. Eve barely listens. Her hand is on the table, fingertips inches from the top of the file, and she focuses in until the world around them is blurred out. “You know, when I was your age, I moved to Ireland to work in a pub. I was a barback.” Eve blinks. “I’d been doing this work since I graduated college and I was tired of it. The drudgery. The paperwork. The murder. So I spent two years, entire time thinking, this is fine. But you know, in the end, I went right back to it. In some ways, this is the only thing I’m really cut out to do.”

“I thought you wanted me taken off the mission.”  
“It takes a certain kind of person to do the things we do, Eve. Really, who am I to judge?”

Eve’s breakfast comes. It’s a plate full of pastries and her stomach turns seeing them. Vomit rises in her throat and she swallows it down. “I think I have to go back to Alaska.”

“That’s disappointing.” Carolyn says frankly. “I was hoping being back would have convinced you to stay.” 

The vomit in her throat becomes an immediate concern. Eve stands abruptly, chair clattering to the ground behind her, and rushes out the door to the sidewalk. Cold air hits her face and assuages some of the nausea but she still stoops over, hands on her knees, much to the chagrin of passing pedestrians. In her haze, Eve gropes for her phone, pressing dial on the last number that had called her. 

“ _ I’m sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed.” _

Eve does vomit then, splattering onto the sidewalk. Somebody in the distance yelps in concern. She feels the presence of a person behind her, not knowing if its Carolyn or the waiter. “That’s alright there, Eve. We’ll get you on a flight out tonight.” 

***

The sharpie makes a squeaking sound as she tugs it across the surface of the map. 

“This is your best bet for skiing. But you might have to wait until the cold front passes.”

  
“How much more snow are we supposed to get?”

  
Eve shrugs. Smiles. Says nothing. She knows she has bags under her eyes because she can feel the heaviness. She hasn’t been outside in days and she knows that it shows. The figure in front of her, wearing a large down jacket that probably cost upwards of two thousand dollars, smiles wearily. 

“Thanks. I’ll let you know how it is out there.” And they lumber off, leaving the lobby pindrop quiet. Who comes to Denali in February? It’s negative ten outside without windchill, and snow has been falling steadily since two days prior. 

Eve looks into her mug, half-filled with coffee that’s since gone cold. She tries to remember the last time she spoke to somebody who wasn’t a patron or one of her coworkers. Ben keeps offering to cover one of her shifts.  _ So I can do what?  _ She wonders. Sit inside her room, watching reality TV and waiting for the phone to ring? Close her eyes and try to picture the pages of the file, go over to find things that she might possibly have missed, wishing she’d had the foresight to snap pictures with her phone? She’d rather be at the front desk. 

It stops snowing that night. Eve is taking the trash out and looks up, squinting at the glassy sky. There are a million stars where there once was none. She looks and looks until the cold stinging her eyes makes tears well at the corner and trail down her cheeks, then she turns and walks back into the hotel. 

“Eve,” May Ann is there when she enters the utility room, kicking snow off her boots. “There’s somebody waiting to check in.”

“Gotcha.” Eve pulls her scarf away from her mouth, relishing in the burn of the warm air on her cheeks. She walks through the utility room, past the kitchen where the cooks are all watching a sports game on the TV, and into the lobby where she doesn’t look up as she slips into her position behind the desk. “Hello! Last name please?”

“Cochran.” Eve wipes at the corner of one eye and taps the name into the reservation into the database. 

“Louise?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll just need a credit card--” Eve half turns and her body fills with an emotion she can only identity as relief. Standing in front of her, a holy shroud in a Canada Goose jacket, is Villanelle herself. There is a credit card on the desk between them and Villanelle is smiling, chin cradled in her palm. Eve hesitates, breathes, and drags the credit card toward herself. “It’s going to put a $200 hold on your account.”

“That’s fine.” 

Everything else happens in silence. She doesn’t realize that her hands are shaking until she tries to push the key card into the slot to magnetize it. She misses once, twice, three times. “Do you need some help?”

“I’m fine.” Eve doesn’t dare look back over her shoulder, knowing that behind her will be Villanelle, looking cheeky. She takes a deep breath to steady herself and, slow as she can, dips the card into the magnetizer and back out. 

“Thank you. Ms.--” Villanelle leans forward and squints, smiling. “Polastri.” And then she’s gone and Eve is standing in the lobby with the wind knocked from her lungs. She looks at the wall clock and notes the two hours until her shift is over, and then slumps into the chair behind the desk. 

When her shift ends, Eve sits behind the desk looking at the clock. Hunter is always about five minutes late. The minute hand rotates again and again as she sits in the same position, hands folded in her lap. Hunter is seven minutes late.

“Morning, boss.” He clearly hasn’t brushed his hair and has a cup of coffee in one hand, using the other to tuck his polo into his khakis. Eve remains sitting. “Boss?”

“Give me one more minute.” They’re quiet, Eve remaining pin still, waiting for the clock to run her out of time. When exactly one minute has passed she stands up abruptly enough that Hunter startles and power walks from the desk into the staff quarters. 

Her body is on autopilot as she shucks her clothes and picks out new ones. Putting on new pants is such a pain that she throws on a nightgown. It’s not sexy, per se, but she thinks that Villanelle won’t care, or that she might even like Eve this way. She leaves her hair down and puts a robe over her outfit, a robe that might promise something more exciting than what actually lies underneath. She just can’t stand the thought of Hunter or Ben catching her trawling the halls in her nightgown, face flush and alive. 

Then she leaves, and she walks. She takes the elevator to the 4th floor (of course Villanelle got their penthouse suite, of course--) and walks with her bare feet down the red carpeted hall. When she gets to the door, she stops. Her body is laden with cement. As hard as she tries, she just can’t make herself do the thing, knock on the door. She feels suspended between realities. She feels like she’s about to make a choice that she will not be able to take back.

The door swings open, and the choice is made for her. 

“I’m sorry.” Villanelle says. “I got tired of waiting.” 

“Hi.” Eve is clutching her robe closed for no real reason. She feels like a dowdy neighbor coming to Villanelle’s doorstep asking her to keep it down. She can see the opulence just over her shoulder, and her eyes track up to see the other woman smiling softly. “You said you wouldn’t come.”

Villanelle steps aside to allow Eve to come into the room which she does, trance like. “I am famously a liar, Eve.” The door shuts behind her back. “You also came to me.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why, I…” Her back is turned to Villanelle and she feels a hand touch her at the exposed place where her neck slopes into her robe. Eve’s eyes close and she lets out a long shudder. Villanelle’s hand pushes Eve’s hair across her other shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“It’s alright.” The other woman coos, stepping closer. Her breath is skating over Eve’s bare skin now, and Eve’s body is slumping back toward the empty space where their bodies will inevitably touch. “You came a long way to get away from me.”

“I don’t know.” Get away from, or get closer too? The line, if there is one, is blurred.

“You know, it seems like we cannot get rid of each other. I wonder what would happen if we stopped trying.”

Their bodies do touch then. It’s Villanelle who is letting out a long breath, and her arm comes around to wrap around Eve’s body and press her close. The robe she’s wearing gapes open and Eve realizes that she’s only wearing underwear underneath. Villanelle’s hand creeps from Eve’s stomach, up, bunching the fabric of her dress on the way, until it’s pressed flatly onto her sternum. “Don’t you dare leave this time.”

“I won’t.” Eve breathes, gasping as she feels Villanelle’s mouth land open on her exposed neck, and then feels herself being spun around so they can kiss properly. It’s open mouthed and wet, and Villanelle is shoving her robe roughly off her shoulders, and she’s tearing at the front of the nightgown until buttons pop and go bouncing off the floor. 

“You  _ are  _ mine.” She says. Eve can’t tell if she’s talking to herself. Her mouth is kissing down to Eve’s exposed nipple. She sucks it, scrapes it with her teeth, and lets it go with a pop. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.” 

“You’re mine, okay, Eve? Nobody else can touch you like this.”

Eve agrees and realizes that she’s been on her way to agreeing this whole time, that there’s been no stopping this since Rome. After months of keeping a vice grip on her life her hand slips off the rope and it is, frankly, glorious. It is glorious to lay on her back and get fucked by somebody who is so ravenous that they cannot keep the movement of their body in check. To watch as Villanelle, practiced and steady and beautiful Villanelle, loses her mind on top of her. Her hand on Eve’s sternum, still, not quite on the delicate skin of her throat, but teasing it, wanting it. Eve knows that she would not do anything to hurt her and so leaves it there, moves her hands to grip at the headboard, a circus performer placing her head in the mouth of a bear and leaving it there. It makes her so wet that Villanelle’s fingers slip out and she has to thrust back in with a grunt, undeterred. 

She could not recognize herself as the person with Villanelle in her lap, half bent forward with one hand steadying herself on the wall, moving her hips in time with Eve’s hand. “Yes, good, good--” She’s in control and she’s not in control. Villanelle is slapping the wall and half sobbing. 

“I don’t ever let anybody do that to me.” Villanelle says when they’re done. Or just intermission, Eve can’t tell. Her eyes are closed and her chest is still heaving from her orgasm. “You are pretty good.” 

“Thanks.” Eve rolls on her side so that her nose is brushing her shoulder. There’s a thick silence between them, the kind that only exists, she thinks, in Alaska. With her free hand Eve reaches across her stomach and without a word Villanelle takes it and interlocks their fingers. When she props her head up she realizes that Villanelle’s eyes are glassy with tears.

***

That night, the northern lights do come, but they are asleep and do not see them. The only person awake is Hunter, who is only outside looking for thirty seconds before he has to step back in. 

_ Just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska _

“Hello?” Eve kills the ignition switch on the truck, leaning back and resting her head. She knows she has about two minutes until it becomes unbearably cold and she’ll have to run inside. 

“You were right.” Carolyn says, no hello’s, no pleasantries. “There were two of them.”

“Oh.” The temperature is rapidly dropping. Eve looks out the driver’s side window toward the cabin, where the driveway faces the kitchen window. Villanelle is there watching. “Well, I told you.”

“Yes.” Villanelle breathes hot air onto the window to create a fog, and then proceeds to make what appears to be a pornographic stick figure drawing. Eve rolls her eyes. “Listen, Eve, I’m not trying to keep you long, I just wanted to say whenever you’re done with your honeymoon we’ve got more work for you here, if you want it.” 

“Sounds good.” Eve isn’t really listening anymore. It’s too cold to exist outside and she’s opening the driver’s side door, stepping out with the groceries in one hand, anxious to be inside. There’s something good waiting for her there. “Bye, Carolyn.”

“Goodbye, Eve.” Carolyn says, smug. Eve doesn’t notice. She just opens the door and steps inside. 

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell i just finished szn 2 on hulu on break from law school? Enjoy this offering on the last days of my break.
> 
> Catch me on tumblr at /seabiscuits-us


End file.
